Transcoder products have typically been limited to one or two channels. However, system-on-a-chip (SOC) technologies allow a transcoder product to integrate a larger number of transcoder channels into a single chassis via multiple transcoder SOC instances. The transcoder SOC instances may perform transcoding in parallel. A host computer processor unit (CPU) communicates with each of the transcoder SOC instances to coordinate the transcoding.
When performing certain mission-critical operations, an infrastructure that guarantees high availability is required. Traditional transcoder products offer hot swapability for components that may fail, such as a transcoder instance. This type of redundancy usually comes at a very high cost. However, hot swapability allows the infrastructure to operate at close to 100% capacity at all times. That is, when a component fails, a new component can be swapped into the infrastructure to replace the failed component while the system continues to run. Thus, the amount of time in which the system is running at less than 100% is low.